Impossible Things by Connie Willis
She went up to the office. “Is Mr. Paprocki in?” she asked Sherri, who was folding a stack of orange papers in half one at a time.
“He’s out on the playground. Brendan James got into a fight. It’s his third fight today. His mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man.”
Dr. Lejeune took one of the folded sheets and unfolded it. It said, “ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” Dr. Lejeune folded it back up. “Make Me Marvy?” she said.
“Yeah, you know, he tells you what colors you can wear by examining your skin tones. And then he runs off with you, at least if you’re Brendan James’s mother. All he did to me was tell me to wear fuchsia.”
Dr. Lejeune took part of the stack of orange sheets and started folding them.
“Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised it happened. There was this article in Woman’s Day about the Donkey Doldrums. You know, that point in a marriage where you feel like all you are is a pack animal, and just the week before she’d been in to bring Brendan his lunch that he forgot, and she told me the only time her husband noticed her anymore was when he needed her to find his keys. It still makes me mad, though. I mean, the Make Me Marvy man was just about the only single guy in town.”
“Is Mr. Paprocki married?” Dr. Lejeune asked, folding.
“Old Paperwork?” Sherri asked, surprised. She folded the last sheet in her pile and got a stamp and stamp pad out of the desk drawer. “Married? Are you kidding? He never looks up from his triplicate forms long enough to see you’re a woman, let alone marry you!” She pounded the stamp into the stamp pad two or three times and banged it onto the folded sheet. It was a smiley face. She whacked the next sheet. “What about Dr. Simons? I suppose he’s too good-looking not to be married.”
“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, thinking of something else. “He spent the last five years in a lamasery in Tibet.”
“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “That’s perfect!”
Dr. Lejeune narrowed her eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, because he’s probably desperate. Five years and no sex would make me desperate,” she said, stamping. “What am I talking about? Five years and no sex have made desperate. But I’ll bet the first woman who comes along can have him for the taking.”
“I’ll try to catch Mr. Paprocki later,” Dr. Lejeune said, handing the stack of folded sheets to Sherri. “Just tell him I want to talk to him about the music room.”
“What about it?”
“It’s too small. They’ve got all that equipment in there, and they can hardly move. I was just wondering if there was some other room they could use.”
“Carolyn Hendricks asked about that this morning, and I asked Old—Mr. Paprocki about. He said he knew it was too small and he’d offered Dr. Young the library instead, but Dr. Young had insisted on the music room. He said it was perfect for what he was going to do.”
While Carolyn was waiting for Wendy at the orthodontist, she unstapled the orange flyer Sherri had handed her on her way out and read it.
“ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” it said in all caps. There were subheadings: Be Aware, Be Prepared, and Be Informed, each with a cute picture of a bee next to it. “Be Aware. Sixteen cases have been reported in the state since school started, two in Henley, though so far we have had no cases in the schools.”
The Be Prepared section listed the symptoms of the disease, and the Be Informed section talked about the incubation period, which was from thirteen to seventeen days, and concluded, “Chicken pox is most contagious the day before any symptoms appear and during the first few days of breaking out.”
Great, Carolyn thought. Neither Liz nor Wendy had had the chicken pox even though they’d both been exposed when they were little.
After Wendy was done, Carolyn ran to the cleaners and the bank and went to the grocery store.
“Don’t forget we’re out of pop,” Wendy said. “And Coach Nicotero said we were supposed to have—”
“The four basic food groups,” Carolyn said. “Are you aware that pop is not a basic food group?”
“Are we going to the mall to get my hightops after this?” Wendy asked. “My shoelaces came untied during practice today and I called a time out and Sarah Perkins said there weren’t any time outs in volleyball and I said there were time outs in every game. So are we?”
“Are we what?” Carolyn said, staring at the two-liter bottles of pop. When she was in college, pop had come in reasonable-sized bottles. They had bought one bottle each of Coke and orange and lemon-lime for their suicides, and what else? Root beer? Cream soda?
“Getting my hightops. At the mall.”
Carolyn looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter to five already, and Dad said he’d be home early tonight. We’ll have to do it tonight after supper.”
“Mother,” Wendy said, somehow managing to get several extra syllables in “mother,” “it’s Wednesday. I have practice at six.”
Carolyn bought two-liter bottles of cola, orange, cream soda, root beer, and lemon-lime and some new batteries for the flashlight and raced Wendy out to the mall to get her hightops. They didn’t get home till five-thirty.
“I’m eating supper over at Lisa’s,” Liz said. “We’re going to do our applications on her computer.”
“I have to be at practice at six,” Wendy said, lacing up her hightops.
Carolyn made Wendy a peanut-butter sandwich and began unpacking the groceries. “Did your father call, Liz?”
“No. Sherri did, though. She wants you to call her at school. What kind of microcomputers did your college have?”
“None.” Carolyn took out the bottles of pop and set them on the counter. “There weren’t any microcomputers in those days.”
“You’re kidding! What did you have, then?”
“It’s twenty to six,” Wendy said, munching on her sandwich.
Carolyn handed Wendy an apple and called Sherri.
“I talked to Monica and Ricky Morales’s mother after school, and she says she’s not surprised Brendan James’s mother ran off with that Make Me Marvy man. She read this article in Cosmopolitan on the seven warning signs of Over-Forty-Frenzy, and she had them all. She was forty-three, her husband was never home, her kids were right at two of the most demanding ages—”
“What? Thirteen and seventeen?” Carolyn asked.
“No. Two and five. The article said she was easy prey for the first man who said two nice words to her.”
“Mom, it’s a quarter to six,” Wendy said.
“I know the feeling,” Carolyn said.
“And I know you,” Sherri said. “You’d never run off with anybody. You’re crazy about Don, and your girls are two of the nicest girls I know.”
“Mom,” Wendy said, pointing at the kitchen clock.
“I’m in kind of a hurry,” Carolyn said. “Can I call you back?”
“You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to warn you that Heidi Dreismeier’s mother called. She heard you were doing tests and wanted to know how Heidi should study for them. I told her not to worry, but you know how she is. She’ll probably call you next. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.
Carolyn pulled her coat on and fished her car keys out of her purse. The phone rang. She handed Liz the keys and picked up the receiver.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Don said. “How was your first day of work?”
“Fine,” she said, waving good-bye to the girls. “We moved equipment all day. And chairs. I’m still not sure what this project is all about. There’s one machine that looks like a giant lava lamp. And the guy I work with—” She stopped.
“The guy you work with what?”
“Nothing. Did you know Brendan James’s mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man? And there have been two cases of chicken pox in Henley.”
“Great,” Don said. “The girls will probably both get it. You’ve had it, haven’t you?”
“What? Chicken pox?” Carolyn said. “Of course I—” She stopped.
“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” Don said. “You’re probably just tired.”
“I am,” she said. “Wendy had her orthodontist appointment and then dragged me all over the mall looking for volleyball shoes, and then Sherri called and Wendy had to go to practice.”
“And you moved equipment all day. No wonder you’re exhausted. Linda says she doesn’t know how you do it all, taking care of the kids and all and now this job. She said she wondered if you had any time left over for being a wife.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I said you were a terrific wife and I—” Don said something to somebody else and then came back on the line. “Sorry. Linda just came in. She went out to get us some sandwiches. That’s what I called about. I thought I was going to make it home early, but Linda is feeling real insecure about the meet tomorrow. She wanted to go over the floor ex routines again. But, listen, sweetheart, I can tell the girls to come in before school tomorrow.”
“No, that’s okay,” Carolyn said. “I’m just being tired and cranky.” She had a sudden thought. “I’ll make myself a suicide,” she said.
“A what?” Don said.
“A suicide,” she said. “We used to drink them in college when we’d had a bad day.”
She told Don good-bye, hung up, and opened all the bottles of pop.
We used to drink them in college, she thought, pouring some Coke into the glass. She added some orange and a little root beer. My roommate Allison and I used to sit on the floor and drink them and talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I do not remember our ever discussing driving people to the orthodontist or volleyball practice or the mall. She added a dollop of grape, filled the glass up with lemon lime, and stirred it with the knife she had used for peanut butter.
I don’t’ remember us ever discussing being married to a coach with a snotty assistant.
She took the suicide into the living room, sat down on the floor, and took a sip. It didn’t taste anything like the suicides she and Allison had made, probably because Allison was the one who always made them. That one fall quarter when Allison was in Europe, she had had to experiment for days before she got the recipe right. That had been a bad fall quarter. It had snowed all the time, and she had sat by the window and drunk suicides and thought about falling in love, and being pursued by handsome men, and sex.
Which reminded her. She set the suicide on the coffee table and went and got the flashlight and put the batteries in.
Andrew got to school early, hoping he’d have a few minutes to try to figure out why he kept thinking he knew Carolyn Hendricks, but she was already there.
“I brought the flashlight,” she said. “Where shall we put it so we both know where it is in case of emergency?”
“How about the top of the piano?” he said.
She set it on end between two gray boxes that didn’t plug into anything. She didn’t look familiar today, which Andrew was grateful for. It was bad enough working on a nutty project without behaving like a nut yourself.
“We’re just going to do some screening today,” he said. “The Idelman-Ponoffo Short-Term Memory Inventory. It consists of reading strings of numbers, letters, and words and having the child repeat them back to you, forward, backward, from the middle—”
“I know,” Carolyn said. “Dr. Young gave it to me when he tested me last year.”
“Oh,” Andrew said. He had had the idea Dr. Young didn’t know her, that she had been picked at random by the elementary school. “Good. You’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll be monitoring their responses. They’ll be hooked up to an EKG and autonomic response sensors, and I’ll be videotaping the testing.”
“Don’t you think all this equipment is liable to scare five-year-olds?”
“That’s what you’re here for. They know you already, and you’ll be the one interacting with them. Don’t start the test immediately. Talk to them awhile, and then we’ll hook them up as unobtrusively as possible and start the test.”
She went and got the first kindergartner and brought him in. “This is Matt Rothaus,” she said.
“Wow, neat!” Matt said, racing over to look at the temporal oscillator. “Star Trek: The Next Generation!”
Carolyn laughed. She leaned forward. “Do you like Star Trek?”
I know you, Andrew thought. I’ve never seen you before, but I’ve heard you laugh and lean forward just like that.
“What did you do in Show and Tell today?” Carolyn was asking Matt.
“Heidi threw up,” Matt said. “It was gross to the max.”
At lunch Dr. Lejeune set her tray down next to Sherri’s. “How’s Heidi?” she asked. “It isn’t the chicken pox, is it?”
“No. Nervous stomach. Her mother—”
“Don’t tell me. She ran off with the man who installed their cable TV.”
“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “Where did you hear that?”
“I was kidding. What about her mother?”
“Oh, she just lessons Heidi to death. Ballet, tap, swimming, tae kwon do. The poor kid probably wishes her mother would run off with somebody and leave her alone.” She sighed. “I wish somebody would run off with me.”
“What about Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune said.
“Old Paperwork? Are you kidding? He’s never even looked at me.” She took a bite of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce. “I think my timing must be off or something. I always meet guys after they’re already married or engaged. Would you believe I was out with strep throat when Dr. Young did all that testing last March or I could have been the one down there in that cozy little music room with Dr. Simons?”
“All what testing?” Dr. Lejeune said.
“The testing he did to find somebody to work with Dr. Simons,” Sherri said, eating her peach slices. “He did all kinds of interviews and stuff and then gave the finalists all these psychological tests. If I’d known how gorgeous Dr. Simons was, I’d have taken a few tests myself, but I thought whoever Dr. Young picked was going to work with him!”
Dr. Young had gone up to Fermilab in February and been gone two months. She had assumed—correction, he had let her assume—he was working with the cyclotron that whole time, trying to get his subatomic hodiechrons to switch phases. “The school wouldn’t have copies of those tests, would it?”
“Are you kidding? Old Paperwork makes me make copies of everything.” She stacked her silverware and milk carton on top of her plate. “My timing’s always been off. In college I kept meeting guys who’d just been drafted.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “It’d be great if this time-machine thing of Dr. Young’s worked, wouldn’t it? You’d be able to go back and get the timing right for once.”
“Yes,” Dr. Lejeune said. “It would.”
• • •
Wendy called after school and told Carolyn they had an out-of-town volleyball game and could Carolyn bring her money for McDonald’s and some Gatorade to drink on the bus. “Coach Nicotero says we have to have lots of electrolytes.” She and Andrew weren’t done testing Heidi Dreismeier, but he told her to go on and he’d finish the last few questions.
Carolyn ran by the grocery store and bought the Gatorade and a two-liter bottle of black-cherry pop, which she’d decided was the secret ingredient in the suicides. She took Wendy the Gatorade and the money and picked up Liz at the high school.
“Can you drop me over at Lisa’s?” Liz sad. “Harvard sent her a recruitment video. I don’t know, though. How important do you think coed dorms are?”
“I don’t know,” Carolyn said, stopping in front of Lisa’s. “We didn’t have them.”
“You’re kidding. How did you meet guys?” She gathered up her books and got
Carolyn went home and made herself a suicide, adding a very small amount of black cherry to try it out. Not only did we not have coed dorms, she thought, we weren’t even allowed to have boys in the dorm. The dorm mother ran a bed check at midnight, and you could be expelled for sneaking a boy into your room, but I still managed somehow to meet boys, Liz. They sat next to me in class, and they danced with me at mixers, and they called me on the phone.
The phone rang. “Thanks a lot for running out on me,” Andrew said.
“What happened?” Carolyn asked. “Did Heidi throw up?”
“Worse. Her mother came in. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to convince her Heidi doesn’t need hodiechronicity lessons.”
“Sherri says she read this article about Housewife Hysteria, and that’s what she thinks Heidi’s mother has,” Carolyn said. She took a sip of the suicide. Black cherry was not the secret ingredient. “She can’t find a socially acceptable outlet for her frustrations and longings.”
“So she makes poor Heidi take belly-dancing. She spent forty-five minutes telling me about their Suzuki lessons. I felt like I was caught in some horrible time dilation. It serves me right for going into this business.”
“How did you get into this business anyway?” Carolyn said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside to see if there were any other flavors of pop she could try.
“You mean why did I decide to study time? Well, I …” There was a long pause and then he said in an odd voice, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember.”
“You mean you just sort of gradually got into it?” There was a jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door with one cherry left in it. She ate the cherry and poured the juice into the suicide. “You just drifted into it?”
“Temporal psychology isn’t something you just drift into,” he said. “This is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me remember.”